"Oh!" she exclaimed, but not in offence. Once more she relapsed into
thought. And as he watched her, in silence, the colour that flowed and
ebbed in her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of
incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture
of jealousy. But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire field;
marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her unflinching
willingness to submit herself to an experiment.

"I suppose so," she replied at length, her thoughts naturally assuming
speech. "Yes, I can see that it is so. Yet my experience has not been
with these conditions with which Mr. Bentley, with which you have been
brought in contact, but with the other side--with luxury. Oh, I am sick
of luxury! I love it, I am not at all sure that I could do without it,
but I hate it, too, I rebel against it. You can't understand that."

"I think I can," he answered her.

"When I see the creatures it makes," she cried, "I hate it. My
profession has brought me in such close contact with it that I rebelled
at last, and came out here very suddenly, just to get away from it in the
mass. To renew my youth, if I could. The gardens were only an excuse.
I had come to a point where I wanted to be quiet, to be alone, to think,
and I knew my father would be going away. So much of my girlhood was
spent in that Park that I know every corner of it, and I--obeyed the
impulse. I wanted to test it."

"Yes," he said, absorbed.

"I might have gone to the mountains or the sea, but some one would have
come and found me, and I should have been bound again--on the wheel.